The Provocative and Practical Guide to Coaching Agile Teams

 

As an agile coach, you can help project teams become outstanding at agile, creating products that make them proud and helping organizations reap the powerful benefits of teams that deliver both innovation and excellence.

 

More and more frequently, ScrumMasters and project managers are being asked to coach agile teams. But it’s a challenging role. It requires new skills—as well as a subtle understanding of when to step in and when to step back. Migrating from “command and control” to agile coaching requires a whole new mind-set.

 

In Coaching Agile Teams, Lyssa Adkins gives agile coaches the insights they need to adopt this new mind-set and to guide teams to extraordinary performance in a re-energized work environment. You’ll gain a deep view into the role of the agile coach, discover what works and what doesn’t, and learn how to adapt powerful skills from many allied disciplines, including the fields of professional coaching and mentoring.

 

Coverage includes Understanding what it takes to be a great agile coachMastering all of the agile coach’s roles: teacher, mentor, problem solver, conflict navigator, and performance coachCreating an environment where self-organized, high-performance teams can emergeCoaching teams past cooperation and into full collaborationEvolving your leadership style as your team grows and changesStaying actively engaged without dominating your team and stunting its growthRecognizing failure, recovery, and success modes in your coachingGetting the most out of your own personal agile coaching journey

 

Whether you’re an agile coach, leader, trainer, mentor, facilitator, ScrumMaster, project manager, product owner, or team member, this book will help you become skilled at helping others become truly great. What could possibly be more rewarding?

This book is certainly about software development management, but it is also a book about business. Managers can no longer afford to discuss these two topics independently. This book is meant to eliminate the seat-of-the-pants intuition and rough approximations that have been far too prevalent in software development management. The growing popularity of agile methods has shown that a healthy balance between strict process and individual flexibility can be achieved. David Anderson takes it a step farther, and explains how the healthy balance of agility can help businesses become more profitable. The result is a book that will allow managers to foster teams that produce better software, less expensively, on time, and with fewer defects.

Erlang solves one of the most pressing problems facing developers today: how to write reliable, concurrent, high-performance systems. It's used worldwide by companies who need to produce reliable, efficient, and scalable applications. Invest in learning Erlang now.

Moore's Law is the observation that the amount you can do on a single chip doubles every two years. But Moore's Law is taking a detour. Rather than producing faster and faster processors, companies such as Intel and AMD are producing multi-core devices: single chips containing two, four, or more processors. If your programs aren't concurrent, they'll only run on a single processor at a time. Your users will think that your code is slow.

Erlang is a programming language designed for building highly parallel, distributed, fault-tolerant systems. It has been used commercially for many years to build massive fault-tolerated systems that run for years with minimal failures.

Erlang programs run seamlessly on multi-core computers: this means your Erlang program should run a lot faster on a 4 core processor than on a single core processor, all without you having to change a line of code.

Erlang combines ideas from the world of functional programming with techniques for building fault-tolerant systems to make a powerful language for building the massively parallel, networked applications of the future.

This book presents Erlang and functional programming in the familiar Pragmatic style. And it's written by Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of Erlang.

It includes example code you'll be able to build upon. In addition, the book contains the full source code for two interesting applications:

A SHOUTcast server which you can use to stream music to every computer in your house, and a full-text indexing and search engine that can index gigabytes of data.

Learn how to write programs that run on dozens or even hundreds of local and remote processors. See how to write robust applications that run even in the face of network and hardware failure, using the Erlang programming language.

For software to consistently deliver promised results, software development must mature into a true profession. Emergent Design points the way. As software continues to evolve and mature, software development processes become more complicated, relying on a variety of methodologies and approaches. This book illuminates the path to building the next generation of software. Author Scott L. Bain integrates the best of today’s most important development disciplines into a unified, streamlined, realistic, and fully actionable approach to developing software. Drawing on patterns, refactoring, and test-driven development, Bain offers a blueprint for moving efficiently through the entire software lifecycle, smoothly managing change, and consistently delivering systems that are robust, reliable, and cost-effective.

 

Reflecting a deep understanding of the natural flow of system development, Emergent Design helps developers work with the flow, instead of against it. Bain introduces the principles and practices of emergent design one step at a time, showing how to promote the natural evolution of software systems over time, making systems work better and provide greater value. To illuminate his approach, Bain presents code examples wherever necessary and concludes with a complete project case study.

 

This book provides developers, project leads, and testers powerful new ways to collaborate, achieve immediate goals, and build systems that improve in quality with each iteration.

 

Coverage includes  How to design software in a more natural, evolutionary, and professional way How to use the “open-closed” principle to mitigate risks and eliminate waste How and when to test your design throughout the development process How to translate design principles into practices that actually lead to better code How to determine how much design is enough How refactoring can help you reduce over-design and manage change more effectively

The book’s companion Web site, www.netobjectives.com/resources, provides updates, links to related materials, and support for discussions of the book’s content.

This concise book addresses the actual details involved with using CRC cards, including coverage of the team approach to analysis and examples of program code (Java, C++, and Smalltalk) derived from the use of the CRC card method.

No book on software project management has been so influential and so timeless as The Mythical Man-Month. Now 20 years after the publication of his book, Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. (best known as the "father of the IBM System 360") revisits his original ideas and develops new thoughts and advice both for readers familiar with his work and for readers discovering it for the first time.

Learn how to design and develop distributed web services in Java using RESTful architectural principals and the JAX-RS specification in Java EE 6. With this hands-on reference, you'll focus on implementation rather than theory, and discover why the RESTful method is far better than technologies like CORBA and SOAP.

It's easy to get started with services based on the REST architecture. RESTful Java with JAX-RS includes a technical guide that explains REST and JAX-RS, how they work, and when to use them. With the RESTEasy workbook that follows, you get step-by-step instructions for installing, configuring, and running several working JAX-RS examples using the JBoss RESTEasy implementation of JAX-RS.

Work on the design of a distributed RESTful interface, and develop it in Java as a JAX-RS serviceDispatch HTTP requests in JAX-RS, and learn how to extract information from themDeploy your web services within Java Enterprise Edition using the Application class, Default Component Model, EJB Integration, Spring Integration, and JPADiscover several options for securing your web servicesLearn how to implement RESTful design patterns using JAX-RSWrite RESTful clients in Java using libraries and frameworks such as java.net.URL, Apache HTTP Client, and RESTEasy Proxy

(Pearson Education) An up-to-date guide to writing use cases, expanding on the classic treatments into intermediate and advanced concepts, making this guide appropriate for all skill levels. Softcover. DLC: Application software—Development.

Presents sound advice for bringing difficult projects to successful conclusion with a minimum of stress. Written for developers and project managers, comparing software development to a game. Softcover.

To lead change, you need to expand your toolkit, and this book gives you the tools you need to make the transition from agile practitioner to agile coach.

Agile Coaching is all about working with people to create great agile teams. You'll learn how to build a team that produces great software and has fun doing it. In the process, you'll grow a team that's self-sufficient and skillful.

This book provides you with deeper knowledge of how agile practices work and how to inspire your team to improve. Discover how to coach your team through the agile lifecycle, from planning to writing software. Learn the secrets of running effective agile meetings and how to get your team following a consistent approach to creating software. You'll find chapters dedicated to introducing Test-Driven Development, designing Retrospectives, and making progress visible.

Find out what works and what to avoid when introducing agile practices to your team. Throughout the book the authors share their personal coaching stories from experience with real teams, giving you insights into what works and what to avoid. Each chapter also covers hurdles that you and your team may face and what to do to clear them.

See how to mine the experience of your software development team continually throughout the life of the project. The tools and recipes in this book will help you uncover and solve hidden (and not-so-hidden) problems with your technology, your methodology, and those difficult "people" issues on your team.

Project retrospectives help teams examine what went right and what went wrong on a project. But traditionally, retrospectives (also known as "post-mortems") are only helpful at the end of the project—too late to help. You need agile retrospectives that are iterative and incremental. You need to accurately find and fix problems to help the team today.

Now, Derby and Larsen show you the tools, tricks, and tips you need to fix the problems you face on a software development project on an on-going basis. You'll see how to architect retrospectives in general, how to design them specifically for your team and organization, how to run them effectively, how to make the needed changes, and how to scale these techniques up. You'll learn how to deal with problems, and implement solutions effectively throughout the project—not just at the end.

With regular tune-ups, your team will hum like a precise, world-class orchestra.

Objective-C is an exciting and dynamic approach to C-based object-oriented programming; it's the approach adopted by Apple as the foundation for programming under Mac OS X, a Unix-based operating system gaining wide acceptance among programmers and other technologists. Objective-C is easy to learn and has a simple elegance that is a welcome breath of fresh air after the abstruse and confusing C++. To help you master the fundamentals of this language, you'll want to keep the Objective-C Pocket Reference close at hand. This small book contains a wealth of valuable information to speed you over the learning curve. In this pocket reference, author Andrew Duncan provides a quick and concise introduction to Objective-C for the experienced programmer. In addition to covering the essentials of Objective-C syntax, Andrew also covers important faces of the language such as memory management, the Objective-C runtime, dynamic loading, distributed objects, and exception handling.

You've already lost your job. You may still be drawing a paycheck, but the job you were hired to do no longer exists. Your company has changed, the technology has changed, the economy has changed, and the ways you can add value have changed. Have you adapted to these changes? Or are you at risk?

Architect your careerEconomic downturn. Job cuts. Outsourcing. The ever-changing tech landscape. The threats abound. Chad Fowler is here to offer 52 ways to keep your job, despite the vagaries of the market.It's all about making the right choices. Choosing which technologies to focus on and which business domains to master have at least as much impact on your success as your technical knowledge—don—don't let those choices be accidental. Chad shows you all aspects of the decision-making process so you can ensure that you're investing your time and energy in the right areas.It's all about skills. You'll develop a structured plan for keeping your skills up-to-date so that you can compete with both the growing stable of developers in so-called low-cost countries as well as your higher-priced local peers. You'll learn how to shift your skillset up the value chain, from an offshore-ready commodity to one in high demand.It's all about marketing. As with any product or service, if nobody knows what you're selling, nobody will buy. Chad shows you how to create a plan for marketing yourself both inside your company and to the industry in general.Like it or not, the IT career landscape has changed. This handbook will teach you what you need to do to avoid being left behind.

About the author Chad Fowler has been a software developer and manager for some of the world's largest corporations. He recently lived and worked in India, setting up and leading an offshore software development center for a large multinational company.

Rails is large, powerful, and new. How do you use it effectively? How do you harness the power? And, most important, how do you get high quality, real-world applications written?

From the latest Ajax effects to time-saving automation tips for your development process, Rails Recipes will show you how the experts have already solved the problems you have. Use generators to automate repetitive coding tasks.Create sophisticated role-based authentication schemes.Add live search and live preview to your site.Run tests when anyone checks code in.How to create tagged data the right way.and many, many more...

Owning Rails Recipes is like having the best Rails programmers sitting next to you while you code.